UCLA UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal Title Congestion and Delay in Asia's Courts Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/14v2n6hw Journal UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal, 4(1-2) Author Falt, Jeffrey Publication Date 1985 DOI 10.5070/P841-2021923 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California CONGESTION AND DELAY IN ASIA'S COURTS Jeffrey Falt* Case backlog and consequent delay in the disposition of dis- putes is a problem familiar to legal professionals the world over. The individual hardships occasioned by inordinate delay in the res- olution of cases, and the resultant diminution of popular confidence in the judiciary, are frequent themes in professional journals and the popular press. Although the problem of delay remains a concern in many American jurisdictions, Third World literature evinces greater alarm over the dangers to political stability posed by increased con- gestion and delay in the courts. Evidence suggests that developing nations are experiencing a rapid increase in litigation such as that which occurred in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America coincident with this country's transformation from an agrarian subsistence economy to a commercial, industrial one.' The American legal system had more than a century to de- velop in tandem with evolving economic, social and political rela- tionships. The responsiveness and adaptability of American legal institutions were further aided by study and dialogue which took place in an open society, and by the availability of a well established physical infrastructure, trained personnel and materiel resources. 2 * Research Associate, Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies. BA, Univer- sity of California at Berkeley (1966); JD, University of California School of Law, Boalt Hall (1969); MA, Development Studies, University of California at Berkeley (1985). Under the auspices of the Asia Foundation, the author has served as a Regional Pro- gram Officer for Legal Services and Social Justice, and as a Regional Specialist for Law. The author wishes to thank Professors Chin Kim, James Anderson, Kenneth Phil- lips, Marc Galanter, Rajiv Dhavan, Bruce Ottley, Dr. Jacqueline Fields and Paul Li for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. 1. In the St. Louis Circuit Court, for example, over the fifty years between the decade of the 1880's, which witnessed the dawn of industrialization in the American West, and the close of the 1920's, the average number of cases filed per decade more than quadrupled while the average rate of litigation (cases filed per capita) more than doubled. Galanter, Reading the Landscape of Disputes: What We Know and Don't Know (and Think We Know) About Our Allegedly Contentiousand Litigious Society, 31 UCLA L. REV. 4, 39 (1983). 2. Although the myriad causes for shifts in the type and volume of litigation in 1985] CONGESTION AND DELAY By contrast, economic development and social change in Asia are proceeding at a far more rapid pace. The reasons for this accel- erated pace include the availability of sophisticated technology, ad- vances in mass communications, greater accessibility to higher education, national ambition and the influence of a world-wide commercial economy. Despite the general rush to modernize over the past four de- cades, Asian governments have allocated little in the way of addi- tional resources for the administration of justice. During the same period, the number of disputes brought to Asia's courts have in- creased markedly. Increased attention to the issue of worsening court congestion and backlog in the Asian literature reflects this perception. Case backlog is considered a serious problem in every non- communist developing country in Asia.3 However, the research ca- pability of many lesser developed countries (LDCs) is limited by the scarcity of funds and trained personnel. Consequently, information on court congestion is far from complete. 4 The object of this paper is to present Asian views of the prob- lem of court congestion and delay5 in ten Asian countries;6 to say something about the probable causes of the problem; and to offer post-industrial America are outside the bounds of this paper, it is illustrative of our sizeable resource base that in response to the "dramatic rise in federal court filings in recent decades ... Not only has the increase in judges kept up with the caseload, but there has been a massive increase in the support staff." Id. at 37. 3. From Pakistan in the west to the Republic of Korea in the northeast, non- communist Asia is comprised of 16 countries with a total population of approximately 1.1 billion. Little reliable data on the problems of dispute moderation in the nations of Vietnam, Kampuchea, Laos, Mongolia, North Korea and The Peoples' Republic of China are available. However, as these countries develop economically and formalize and depoliticize their systems of conflict management, delay problems may become evident. 4. For the most part, government research into court delay is a recent phenome- non in Asia. 5. For the most part, terms such as "congestion", "backlog" and "delay" are not explicitly defined in the Asian literature. The implicit meaning of these terms varies with the commentator, the country and the structure of the legal system under scrutiny. Therefore, not only do substantial differences in law, practice and the meanings of court congestion and delay make cross-national comparisons unreliable, given the nature of information presently available, even same-country studies cannot be compared without careful analysis and qualification. It is not the aim of this article to impose a false consistency on the terminology or to presume meanings identical to those which are found in Anglo-American studies of court delay. Rather, one must recognize that the meanings of congestion, backlog and delay are as specific to the literature of a given country (or a particular study) as causes and potential remedies are to local conditions. Since the problem of delay is primarily national, formulation of a standard international definition is unnecessary. However, consistency in the meaning and usage of court de- lay terminology within the literature of each country is important and, for the most part, is yet to be achieved. 6. The availability of information helped to define the geographic parameters of this study. Little is available from Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives, Brunei and PACIFIC BASIN LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 4:90 strategies for reducing Asia's massive case backlogs so as to 7 heighten judicial responsiveness to the needs of disputants. I. WESTERN INFLUENCE The traditional legal cultures of Asia were profoundly affected by Western colonialism. Even the legal systems of countries not under direct European colonial rule, such as China, Japan, Korea, Formosa (Taiwan) and Thailand underwent significant changes as a result of exposure to Western concepts of jurisprudence.8 In all Asian countries, however, at the national level, European laws and legal structures came to predominate.9 By and large, the legal sys- tems received from the West during the colonial period were con- firmed at independence as the basic law of the country.1 0 However, penetration of received law into the rural areas, where most Asians still live, is far from complete. Legal systems in Asia vary significantly from country to coun- try, due in part to historical factors and current levels of economic and political development. I Most Asian countries, however, have pluralistic legal systems in which several distinct bodies of law- formal, non-formal and religious-operate. Western civil or com- mon law predominates among the urban based citizenry, in the more developed sectors of the economy and in matters of national administration. Customary laws remain paramount in isolated re- gions. In addition, a substantial body of law rooted in religious phi- losophy and practice affects particular issues such as marital status, inheritance of property, and small-scale commercial transactions. Finally, in most countries there is a growing body of statutory and administrative law which has been enacted and developed since the achievement of national independence. Afghanistan, while incorporating the countries of the South Pacific or the Middle East would not have been possible within the confines of a journal article. 7. Most of the literature on court congestion and delay in Asia is of limited distri- bution and only available locally. 8. Of course, various indigenous legal traditions, both secular and ecclesiastic, predate European contact and some of these pre-contact legal systems retain considera- ble vitality. 9. Often the successful borrowing of Western law has meant an accommodation rather than a surrender of traditional values. See C. KIM, SELECTED WRITINGS ON ASIAN LAW 62 (1982). 10. This seemingly uncritical adoption of European law and legal systems is less surprising when one considers the numbers of lawyers educated in the tradition of the .mother country" involved in independence movements and post independence governments. 11. The persistence of pre-colonial legal traditions, both religious and secular, is most evident in the less developed countries of Asia. 1985] CONGESTION AND DELAY II. CIVIL LAW NATIONS Excepting the Middle East, the non-communist civil law na- tions of Asia are Japan, the Republic of Korea (Korea), the Repub- lic of China (Taiwan), Thailand and Indonesia. These five countries fall easily into two sub-groups. The three Northeast Asian civil law nations (Japan, Korea, Taiwan) share a larger cultural tradition. They are more economically advanced than the other two and their legal systems have much in common.1 2 In fact, the court systems of all three are patterned on the German court system. The tradi- tional Confucian preference for non-formal methods of conflict res- olution is evident in the legal cultures of all three countries.1 3 The two Southeast Asian civil law nations, Thailand and Indo- nesia, are less developed, less politically centralized and less cultur- ally homogeneous.